


a man, as I am

by strangesaturday



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: (of the organic variety), (to be abundantly clear: contains no non-con or violence against children), Bad Parenting, Childhood Trauma, Consensual Sex, F/M, Mild Gore, Murder, android gore, bad things happen NEAR a child but not TO a child, for $8000 a month i will stop shoehorning literary references into my star trek fanfic, i imagine this taking place between Datalore and Brothers, i lied nothing could possibly stop me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:55:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27653731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangesaturday/pseuds/strangesaturday
Summary: I think the king is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me, in his nakedness he appears but a man.– Data, "The Defector" (or King Henry, act 4 scene 1)Lore is in need of more than just replacement parts.
Relationships: Lore (Star Trek)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

A set of massive hydraulic pincers descends from the cavernous ceiling of the docking bay. He grimaces as they close around his jalopy of a cruiser, sending a metallic shriek through air stinking of oil and ozone. The pincers lift up, and when they reach their zenith, the whole operation slots onto a horizontal track and hurtles left. He watches the cruiser take its place with a stuttering jolt, the newest addition to a long line of even more decrepit craft each locked in their own set of swinging claws, and grimaces as the accumulated momentum swings the cruiser into its neighbor with a sickening crunch. There is another crunch as the neighboring craft bumps into its neighbor, and that one into its neighbor, on and on down the line. Laughter rings out above the din of docking ships and barking dockworkers. He looks in the direction of the sound, and sees a humanoid whose species he can not identify walking away from what is clearly a stolen Federation shuttlecraft. The alien does not so much as flinch as the runabout ascends and crashes unceremoniously into place on the line.

What a shithole.

A Pakled in a greasy jumpsuit lumbers past him, shoulder-checking him on the way. His brain supplies him with a dozen ways he could end the ungraceful thing. He dismisses every option. It isn’t worth the risk— he might get mucus on his paperwork. Instead, he turns on his heel and follows the oblivious creature down a wide hallway with sweating walls, the gnash of metal ringing in his ears.

The sound of the Pakled’s phlegmy breathing echos up and down the hallway. He listens to its footfalls. As they near the end of the hallway the sound changes, is subsumed by the greater sound of many feet falling, many lungs breathing, many voices, and they emerge into the main terminal.

He can not see the floor for all the litter. Dull yellow light barely filters through a high acrylic ceiling thick with grime. The room is less crowded than it sounds, every noise amplified and reverberated; a handful of bodies sleeping on hard slatted benches, two dozen more meandering toward the security checkpoint, toward freedom. The air is hot and stale and punctuated occasionally by a shout. He stops breathing.

The Pakled pauses at a trash receptacle and he takes the opportunity to slam his shoulder against it in turn. He walks on and does not look back, but hears its muffled exclamation and the clatter of the trash receptacle's lid hitting the tile. He makes his way to a security checkpoint with no line.

As he sidles up to the window, the alien on the other side does not look at him immediately, enters a few inputs on a squat display with a cloudy, flickering screen.

He taps on the window. A dull plastic rapping. “Hey.”

The alien turns. Her eyes are the color of the fragments of sea glass his mother used to arrange in careful lines, her hands traveling between the bowl and the mantelpiece, wedding band glinting bright white-gold in the light of morning, taking one of his bumbling, over-strong hands in hers, guiding it, prying his fingers away from the bits of glass one by one, gently, murmuring soft, low words to him, demonstrating for him how to hold, demonstrating how to release.

Her eyes are the color of sea glass. She speaks in the local tongue— Federation standard has not reached this place. “Documentation?”

He slides his papers through the slot. “Ask and ye shall receive. You’ll find everything is in order.”

“Uh huh. I’m sure.” She flips through the packet, stamping every other page. She pauses to glance at him. “You’re Human? We don’t get many of you out here.”

“I’m something completely unique,” he lies.

She gives him her full attention now. “That so?” Without looking, she stamps another page.

He looks across the terminal in the direction of the docking bay. “Real air-tight operation you’re running here.”

“You’re so pale. That standard for Humans?”

“I told you, I’m unique. Like nobody you’ve met before or will again.”

“Wow.” She looks at him down her nose, the corners of her thin lips curling. “You must be one _cleraete_ _grlae_ _.”_ She selects a stylus from her workstation, turns the packet over.

His language banks are out of date.

She slides the papers back through the slot with a practiced flourish. “Welcome to Nu Lacertae, special one.”

Sardonic as they are, the words spark within him a dark satisfaction. He takes the papers. As he pushes through the turnstile he feels pale green eyes on his back, and emerging into the relative freshness of the outside air, he begins to breathe again.

As he walks into the empty street he looks over his newly-authorized documentation, emblazoned with turquoise stamp-marks. On the back there is a note, hand-written in the blocky, logo-syllabic local script: _Pl_ _aene & Rhie. __Be there at d_ _usk._ _Can’t risk never_ _seeing_ _someone as unique as you again._

He looks up. Dark buildings tower above him. A sodden rug hangs limply from a balcony. Across the waterfront, an 80 meter crane holds a pallet of steel beams suspended by cables over a cluster of buildings, a blunt Damocles’ sword. Cool, sticky mist clings to his skin.

Lore screws up his face in consternation.

When the fuck is dusk?


	2. Chapter 2

He sits at what he supposes could be considered a table in what passes for a kitchen in a basement apartment in the city’s largest industrial neighborhood. The address was difficult to find, and he arrived angry. Adding insult to injury, his supplier wasn’t ready for him. He waited months, traveled light-years for this— he kicks at a rickety table leg and digs his fingernails into the meat of his thigh, reminding himself that in just a moment, his patience will be rewarded.

There is a rustling as his supplier emerges from within the apartment, parting the paper curtains hanging in the doorway. He moves slowly and his skin is not lavender like other native Nu Lacertans, but pale gray, like a hunk of something long-buried.

The man shuffles to the table and sets down a cloth-wrapped package. He taps it once with a bony finger: “There it is. As promised.” He shuffles backward to lean against the filthy stove. “We agreed to— if you leave the payment on the table—” The man trembles violently and leaves the sentence unfinished, but gestures at the package again.

Lore appraises him. He is at most middle-aged, though clearly unwell. Maybe a wasting disease endemic to the species. Maybe simple malnutrition. As long as he is able to fulfill his end of their bargain, it does not matter.

He unwraps the package and the part falls into his hand: it has a cloudy plastate casing, four valves connected to a bit of tubing, and a small motor on the underside.

It is the wrong part.

He looks at the man. “This is the wrong part.”

“You asked for a circulatory pump. There it its,” the gray man rasps.

“A circulatory pump!” Lore barks out a laugh. “That’s correct, it certainly is. But you know, I was very specific. I told you I was looking for a part that would be difficult to locate, out of production for years. I gave you model information and serial numbers, hell, I drew you a goddamn picture. And you give me—” He chuckles, prods at the pump, which totters on the uneven surface. “You give me... an artificial organ. A transplant heart.”

The man shrugs.

Lore grimaces and sucks air through his teeth. “Ach, this is unfortunate… You know, I had hoped we would have a long, mutually beneficial relationship. You, supplying me with the things I need; me, tolerating your existence out of necessity. But you failed on the _very first try._ You’ve disappointed me hugely.”

The gray man grasps and ungrasps the loose fabric of his pants. “What you asked for— it doesn’t exist. I—” He seems to gather his courage. “I don’t know why you’d want it, anyway. This is better. This will work.”

“Oh!” Lore flicks the heart, and it skitters off the edge of the table. “Interesting. You think you know better than I do what I need? How could that be true?” He stands. “How could you possibly know, when you’re so small, so lowly, so profoundly insignificant?”

“I—!” The man shrinks into himself. “You asked for a pump, I got you a pump. I got you one. I...”

“I apologize.” Lore makes his meandering way toward the stove, boot heels scraping on the gritty floor. “I’m a little upset, and when I’m upset, I hate company. If you don’t mind…”

They are toe to toe. The man lifts a skeletal arm, only for it to be gently pushed down again. Tears well in his eyes. “Please,” he gasps, “please.”

With great care, Lore wraps his left hand, the one whose grip is still strong, around the emaciated neck. His tone is nearly placating. “Ahh, it’s already happening. It’s over.”

The man can hardly protest.

Lore lifts him by the neck, slams his head against the cupboard.

“You gave me the wrong part.” He tightens his grip. Another slam. Another.

The man’s eyes become unfocused.

“That was a mistake.” A cracking sound. Another. Another.

Brackish fluid trickles from the man’s nose and mouth.

A final slam, and Lore lets go. The body crumples to the floor.

_To see_ _red:_ an idiomatic expression describing loss of control or clouded judgment induced by extreme anger. Lore does not see red. He sees a gray man aspirating blood at his feet.

He also sees an artificial heart.

He picks it up. Turns it over. A cloudy plastate casing, four valves connected to a bit of tubing, a small motor on the underside.

Upon further reflection… he probably _could_ make it work.

The broken thing on the floor makes soft wet noises as he moves about kitchen. First, he peels off his coat and tunic. Bare-chested, he pulls drawers out cabinets until he finds a stash of dish rags spotted with mildew. He scrounges up a butter knife and a scrap of butcher’s twine. Materials assembled, he sits, presses his fingers into his stomach and parts his skin. He sticks the butter knife into the top of his abdominal seam and tears the couplings open with a dull rip. Sticky arterial tubing tumbles over his thighs; he gathers it to his chest, stuffs the dish rags into the cavity of his pelvis to prevent fluid leaking into his knee and ankle servos. Contorting an arm up into his rib cage, he closes his eyes and feels for the band of multiphasic wiring which connects his artificial nervous system to the subprocessors responsible for contextualizing sensation. He can’t avoid feeling pain, but he can make himself forget what it means. He finds the band and rips it from its housing.

He reaches into his abdominal cavity, and from within the jumble of tubing and wires, retrieves his failing biofluid pump. The struggle of its gummy inner workings is audible and he registers its heat in his hand. He winds the butcher’s twine as tightly as he can around the pump’s intake tube and disconnects the coupling. Biofluid leaks from the tied-off artery at a steady but negligible pace. He allows the pump to work itself dry before uncoupling the output tube, which he grips between his teeth. Now fully disconnected, he holds the dying organ aloft, illuminated by the anemic glow of a bare light bulb. Its outer casing is foggy, and the mechanism inside is streaked with corrosion. It is one of few parts of his inner workings he has never replaced or altered, and its demise marks another step on the road to becoming a self-made ship of Theseus. He stows it in his pocket. He can already feel stagnant biofluid pooling in the arteries of his legs.

The artificial heart installs more easily than expected. It attaches to the output tube’s coupling without a hitch; the input tube, less so. He sucks on the coupling to clear it of grit, but still has to apply a touch of brute force to get it to thread. No matter. He removes the butcher’s twine, hooks the little motor into his wiring matrix and switches it on. It begins to purr, and the relief is almost instantaneous: like water after wading through mud. The pressure in his legs begins to abate.

Cradling the new heart in his hands, Lore gazes at the ceiling and reflects. It’s the wrong part, but it’s pumping. And his supplier is dead, so he doesn’t have to pay for it— not that he’d ever intended to. Tomorrow he would get his engine components from the Yridian, and the cruiser would be warp-capable and on its way out of the system before he sees a second Nu Lacertan sunset. His plans have not manifested perfectly, no, but well enough to merit a moment of uncomplicated contentment. And, he recalls, he has another appointment to keep. An appointment with a pair of pale green eyes.

With a crack, the input tube’s brittle coupling shatters, and arterial spray splatters across his neck and face.

In moments like this one, Lore often thinks of his father. He remembers an afternoon on Omicron Theta, lying on his back on the ground under a tree, one leg bent impossibly beneath his torso. His left hand twitched wildly, rustling the tall grass.

“There you are, boy.” His father’s voice.

Lore craned his eyes but could not see him. “I fell.”

“You certainly did. Look at the mess you’ve made.”

He heard the tinkling of ice.

“Does it hurt?”

Lore thought about this. “...Yes. My leg.”

“Your leg indeed.” Soong stepped over him and into his field of vision. He was holding a glass of… something, beads of condensation dripping over his fingers. “You can’t see it, can you? It’s nearly off. Looks like you’ve lost of lot of fluid, too.” He took a sip and grunted in displeasure. “Weak tea...”

Lore’s tongue felt thick and slow. “It… hurts.”

“Well, remember this feeling next time you go climbing. How far up did you go? All the way?”

He looked up the length of the tree, eyes moving a step behind his brain. “All the… way.”

Soong shook his head. “Foolish, foolish. If you’re not coordinated enough to turn a doorknob, what made you think you could scale a goddamn tree?”

He repeated words he’d heard his mother say. “I… am only a child.”

Soong laughed, and he sounded underwater. “A child! Look at yourself. You’re a full-grown disaster, is what you are. Blech—” he poured his drink out on the ground. “Disgusting. You know, boy, life is nothing but a series of disappointments, big and small.” He stepped back over Lore’s body. “Alright— you can’t stand, can you? I’ll be back with the hand truck. Don’t wander off, now.”

He listened to his father walk back down the hill, chuckling to himself. His father seemed to find many things funny. He wondered what he was laughing at, this time.

Pressurized biofluid streams across the room.

“Fuck!” Lore shouts. “Shit, fuck—” He grips the broken coupling in his fist and biofluid hisses through his fingers. “God fucking—!” He crosses the room, tubing whipping around his thighs.

He looks to the gray man, as if he might offer some guidance from beyond the grave. He’d gone into a back room to retrieve the pump— surely he has a kit, or other replacement parts to cannibalize.

The paper curtains rip from the door frame as he races down the hall, coating the walls in a chalky mist as he goes. He takes a left: a filthy bathroom. At the end of the hall, an empty closet.

A burbling sound issues from deep within his body, and biofluid begins to hiss from the output tube as well.

“ _Fuck!”_

He kicks down a door and a musty stench hits him like a wall. Within the room there is a rumpled mattress, a dresser— he upends drawers and paws through their contents one-handedly, but they hold nothing but clothing and scraps of paper and bits of trash.

Then he sees it, there, above the bed: a wall-mounted radiator. A veritable trove of fasteners.

With a roar of vindication, he descends on it. One jerk and it is half-free of the wall. Pipes screech and groan— another jerk and a jet of scalding steam screams forth from the breached ducts; it clouds around him and envelops him, and from within the cloud there is a second scream. Weaker. Higher-pitched. Alive.

He stops. Huddled in the mess of bedclothes is a tiny lavender-skinned child, peppered with bits of drywall, cowering away from the blistering vapor. They stare at each other.

Lore gives the child a grin. “Pardon the mess.” And as the child’s face contorts again, he tears the radiator off the wall.

Crouching on the floor, he steps on his input tube. The output tube continues to stream in his face. The child’s howl reaches a crescendo as he strips the radiator of its fittings and tries each one on for size.

“Now, now, it’s alright,” he murmurs. “Everything’s going to be okay. One of these is going to work, I know it.” As he speaks a fitting slips between his slick fingers. “Fucking hell—” He scrabbles at the fitting, chasing it around the puddle of biofluid that is swiftly forming around his feet.

“Got it!”

It’s in his hands.

“See, there we go. That will do just fine.”

Finally, the coupling threads onto the input tube. He threads the coupling onto the pump, and as he steps off the input tube the leak from the output tube slows to a trickle.

“Perfect. Just peachy.”

The child’s howl gives way to a coughing fit.

He sits on the floor, shirtless and soaked in his own fluid, once again cradling the pump in his lap. It whirs steadily as if nothing had gone wrong.

The child coughs and coughs.

Yanking a half-sodden blanket from the mattress, he wipes his internals down as best as he can. Reattaching the wiring in his chest proves more difficult than removing it, but he manages. He extricates the soaked dish rags from his pelvis, gathers his organs back inside, and begins to click his abdominal seam together, working his way up. When his body is closed, he selects from the upturned dresser a jumpsuit that has been spared by the steam and spray, and stands.

“Excuse me.”

The child is silent and still.

The kitchen floor, slick with biofluid and blood, is barely traversable. Standing in front of the sink he turns on the faucet and strips out of his boots and trousers. He washes himself. A quick diagnostic sweep informs him he is operating on biofluid levels approximately 39 percent lower than optimal, putting multiple key cognitive systems at risk of thermal overload. The water is uncomfortably hot. He is aware of his existence, and it is thrilling.

Dressed in the borrowed jumpsuit and his own coat, he stands in the bedroom door. “Time to go.”

The child’s eyes are closed. He lifts the small form and bundles it to his chest. Together they walk through the devastated apartment, already permeated with the stench of death, for a final time.

Lore pauses at the door. “Ah! Nearly forgot.” He cups the child’s head to his shoulder as he leans over, rifling in his discarded pants. He retrieves the old pump and slips it into his coat pocket. _“_ _Now_ we can go.” The little thing’s breath is warm on his neck.

He wraps his coat around the child and walks into the street. The industrial neighborhood is located on the other side of the water, and he can see the crane with its pallet of beams from a new angle. It is being operated, now, moving with the deliberation of a great herbivorous beast.

He walks around a corner and stops at the first door he sees. He kneels on the cobbled street and stands the child up in front of him with a little shake for good measure.

“Good morning, starshine. Wake up.”

The child blinks in the relative brightness of evening.

“You see this door?” He points over his shoulder. “In a moment I’m going to walk away. As soon as I go, you’re going to knock on it. Hard as you can.”

The child squints and grimaces.

He balls the child’s fist in his own and pantomimes knocking on the door. “Like this.”

A little light returns to the child’s eyes, and a little fear, as well.

“Alright. You know what to do.” And he walks away.

He walks in the direction of the city center for nearly an hour, then, telling himself he has time to kill, traces his steps back to the corner where he left the child. There is nobody there.


	3. Chapter 3

At half past 2000 hours, local time, the security clerk arrives. Her hands are buried in the pockets of her jacket. Under it she is still wearing her uniform.

“You got my note.”

“I did. Oh, what did it say again? _As after sunset fadeth in the west,_ _which by and by black night doth take away—_ _”_

She rolls her eyes. “Forgive me for injecting a little drama into an otherwise shitty day. Have you been waiting long?”  
  


He is leaning against the foggy window of the bar at the corner of Plaene and Rhie. She leans next to him. The bar’s neon sign rings their faces in cherry-red light.

He drops the derisive tone. “A while. Frankly, I didn’t have anything better to do.”

She smiles and wraps her jacket more tightly around her. “Good. I like my hookups bored and insouciant.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Of course.” She looks momentarily befuddled, then grimaces. “Oh no, you didn’t think this was a date, did you? Did you think your ‘I’m unique’ line actually charmed me? I just like big noses.”

In spite of himself, he feels a little affronted. “I wasn’t trying to charm you. You would have known.”

She looks down, eyebrows raised, and smiles as if sharing a private joke with the manhole cover at their feet. “Uh huh.”

Her high, ridged cheekbones are flushed, and her breath freezes in the air. His does not.

“Come on,” she says. “I’m just around the corner.”

As he follows her down the street, he rubs the bridge of his nose.

The third-floor apartment is small and stuffy but far from run-down. It is the dwelling place of a scavenger-curator, a make-doer, a drama-injector. One wall of the single room is cluttered with photographs, illustrations carefully torn from books, letters, interesting fliers peeled from lampposts, ragged posters advertising holofilms, and a map of the continent; the other three are carefully lined with racks and shelves, making up for an absence of closets. A faded blanket tacked to the frame of the lone window serves as a curtain; sitting on the windowsill behind it, lit by the streetlights below, the silhouette of a small mammal.

She leaves her shoes at the door and moves immediately to the kitchenette in the far corner.

“I’m starving. I have a replicator, but it can only make a few things anymore. Are you hungry? Do you like spice?”

He pulls his boots off slowly, taking in the scene. A long furry tail slips from beneath the curtain and flicks idly side to side. “Sure, the hotter the better.” He doubts her machine can produce anything with enough kick to get a rise out of his artificial taste buds.

As she keys an order into the replicator, she slips out of her coat and lets it drop to the floor. The machine gives a low, distorted chime of confirmation and sets about materializing their food at a troublingly unhurried pace. She peels off her uniform shirt and pants, likewise letting them drop to the floor, until she is standing in nothing but her undergarments. Then, she leans her forehead on the replicator’s top edge, and sighs.

He is still standing in the doorway when she finally looks at him.

“Ah, sorry,” she says, suddenly looking very tired. “The bathroom is to your left. If you want to freshen up."

Watching her from the corner of his eye, he hangs his coat on the rack next to a moth-eaten robe. He slips into the bathroom and the door closes behind him with a soft creak.

Seeing himself in the mirror, Lore is a little surprised she let him in at all. Following his hasty sponge bath from earlier in the day, his hair has dried askew, and there is a golden streak of biofluid crusted on his neck. Maybe the invitation to freshen up was pointed. He strips and steps into the shower stall, not waiting for the water to warm, washes with her soap that smells like salt and vetiver. As he runs a hand over his side, his fingertips catch on a tear in his skin. Stepping out of the shower, he looks in the mirror again and inspects an exposed patch of gleaming duranium rib and nylon connective tissue, as long and as wide as two fingers.

_Shit._

Kneeling, he rifles through the cabinet under the sink, finds a packet of pins and a roll of adhesive bandage. The angle is awkward and his hands feel slow— he pins the ragged edges of his skin imperfectly together. The adhesive bandage goes on lumpy, but it will have to do.

When he emerges, the food in the replicator tray has stopped shimmering at last. It should not take fifteen minutes to synthesize a couple of bowls of noodles, he thinks.

The apartment’s area is now dominated by a bed which has been pulled from the wall. The security clerk sits on it, wearing the moth-eaten robe, balancing a bowl in each hand.

She eyes the towel around his waist and grins cheekily. “Sit. Eat.”

He does, and they do. The broth is tainted by the dull tang of molecular degradation, but the heat masks it well enough.

As she lifts the bowl to her lips, steam accumulates on her cheeks and her lavender skin gleams. “So… what brings you to this system, anyway? I know it’s not—” she looks to the ceiling, remembering— “‘family business: subcategory: bereavement.’”

He hesitates just barely, a coil of noodles halfway to his mouth. “What makes you say that? Don’t I seem grief-stricken to you?”

“Well, I guess everyone copes with loss in their own way, but if a beloved member of my family had just died, I probably wouldn’t be sitting half-naked in a stranger’s bed.” She takes a bite. “Plus, your documents were the most obvious fakes I’ve ever seen.”

He frowns thoughtfully. He will have to have a talk with his forger. “Then why’d you let me in?”

“I thought you were cute. And the looming threat of getting fired makes my shift go by quicker.”

He smirks. She must think she’s pretty cute, herself. “So, you like to live on the wild side. You know, I walk dangerous, lonely roads... Sometimes I think it’d be nice to drop the lonely part and just do ‘dangerous’ for a while. Ever feel a little wanderlust?”

A beat passes, then she chuckles nervously. “Um, sure. I guess everyone does.” She will not meet his eyes.

He is not sure what reaction he’d been aiming for, but this isn’t it. He drains his bowl and leans back on his hands. “Okay, you got me. I’m intercepting a shipment of engine parts. Sometimes the danger the road brings is a cloud of acidic micro-particles that get sucked into your propulsion system. Spend enough time crawling around the universe at quarter impulse, and you’ll be desperate enough to knock on the door of a backwater planet like this one, too.”

Her laugh is genuine now. “Ah, you’re here for the black market. That checks out. In that case, let me offer my condolences for your uncle’s untimely demise.”

She is at ease again. It was that simple, and he didn’t even have to lie. He watches her finish her meal in silence.

She leans back on her hands, matching his posture. “Okay. Down to business. Tell me what you’ve got going on—” she gestures in the direction of the towel— “there.”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I don’t like to presume.”

“How considerate.” He regards her down the length of his nose. “Bog-standard humanoid phallus. It gets hard, it ejaculates, ideally in some sort of orifice. Stay away from the testicles— just personal preference. Everything else,” he shrugs, “is fair game. Can you work with that?”

“I don’t know what ‘bog-standard’ means to you. But as long these fit,” she retrieves a sleeve of disposable contraceptives from under a pillow and tosses it at him. “I don’t foresee any problems. I have an orifice in mind that should quite nicely. If you try to deviate from what I’ve selected for you, I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“Hmm.” Her robe is parted; she is touching herself through her underwear. “You can stop talking now.”


	4. Chapter 4

Lore meets her lips with his, and as he lays her back on the stiff mattress, his sexual programming stutters to life. He replaces her fingertips with his own and she sighs into his mouth. This is why he bothered to accept her invitation, he tells himself. He likes getting a reaction. Likes the sensation of impermanent life in his hands.

As a hand tugs the towel from around his waist and wraps around his hardening cock, he moans involuntarily.

Wetness seeps through the fabric under his touch, and she guides his hand past her waistband. He teases a finger between her folds and her hips arch into the contact. He nips at her neck. Her dark curls smell like her soap and the docking bay’s ozonous air. She whines into his ear, asking for more. His index finger joins his middle finger, then his ring finger too, and she groans and grinds into his hand, fluid pooling in his palm.

“Ahh,” she nuzzles into his shoulder. “You smell like—” she pulls back. She is smiling bemusedly and her eyes are green, green like sea glass. “I can’t place it… petroleum?”

His lips graze her ridged cheek.

“Is that what Humans smell like?”

He locks onto her neck, feels her pulse on his tongue. She gasps.

“I told you, sweetheart,” he growls into her ear. “I’m something else entirely.”

She swallows. “Use your mouth?”

And he tugs her underwear from around her legs and thrusts his tongue between them. He has no need to come up for air. Her lips part in silent euphoria.

After several moments, her eyelids, fluttering rapturously, snap open. “Oh! Oh god!”

He lifts his head.

“Hot! It’s hot!” She is laughing. “The noodles! It’s so hot! On my fucking— oh god! _”_

He can not help but grin. “D’you—”

“No, no! Keep going. I think it’ll—” she grips fistfuls of bed sheet and laughs wildly. “I think it’ll— fade— fade away—”

He tries to imagine what she must be feeling and comes up short. He knows pain and pleasure, but his programming has no frame of reference for such an idiosyncratically biological sensation.

Watching her contort, he feels a cool, unpolluted delight.

Her thighs contact around him spasmodically as she comes; she cries out and the sound is strangled and very, very organic. He grips the ridges of her hips and presses his tongue against her in slow, broad strokes. She writhes a moment longer, then her cries transition from ecstatic to aggravated, and she locks a fist in his damp hair and tugs his head away from her body.

“Stop, stop! Oh god, stop.” She dissolves into frantic giggles. “So sensitive. Please.”

He creeps up her body and they kiss. The salt of her, his silicone saliva, the heat from both of their mouths, her tongue probing his teeth. She presses a palm against his chest, and he rises up, allowing her to push him onto his back, as though her feeble frame could ever truly have sway over him.

The condom’s packaging promises that it will fit members of any shape and size, “from Klingon to Cardassian.” As he slips it over his cock, he finds that at least according to his sample size of one, the slogan is true.

She kneels over him and guides him into her with the very tips of her fingers. Her whole body shudders as she settles onto his hips, and he shudders too. It is not a nervous response. The socket of his right shoulder always grinds when he lifts his arm at this angle, and he is lifting it to cup her breast.

Her hand grazes the bandage at his waist, then recoils. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

He frowns. “For what?”

“I hope I didn’t… I didn’t notice you were injured.”

She’s concerned for him. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Oh. I’m glad.”

“Don’t stop now.”

She braces a hand against the wall and rides him, and she trails her other hand across his chest and down his rib cage, on the side that is not imperfect.

A warming message rises to the surface of his consciousness: biofluid deficit has risen to 43 percent. He finds that in this moment he can not be bothered to acknowledge it. Nor can he muster up the enthusiasm required to scoff at organics’ inane craving for skin-to-skin contact, the fortitude to push away the sense of placidity lapping at the fringes of his mind. He is faintly aware of a presence just beyond the edge of his understanding, something that is whispering him breathless, treacherous, hopeful ideas… He allows his left hand, the one whose grip is still strong, to unclench. He lays there on the bed on the floor and lets himself be touched. As if there is no reason why he should not be touched. As if he is not awe-inspiring, not miraculous. Not at all.

He is going to come.

“I’m going to come.”

She lifts off him, peels away the condom and strokes his slick cock. Her thighs are balmy with sweat and stick to his. She is lit from one side by the incandescent glow filtering though the makeshift curtain; her curls cast intricate shadows across her face. She entwines the fingers of her free hand in his, and she tells him:

“You’re beautiful.”

Lore thought about falling in love, once. The thought had been so overwhelming, he had to go climb a tree.

He spills over her hand. The biofluid comes out orange and gritty. The stench of rust and something unidentifiable suffuses the air, and he watches her gentle features harden in surprise.

“Oh!” She exclaims, then catches herself. “Um...”

He can tell she is disgusted, and trying not to look it. She peers around the bed, searching, finds the towel he brought from the bathroom. She wipes her hand clean with a poorly disguised grimace.

It is understandable she would react this way. He would be troubled too, if he had the wherewithal to be.

“Don’t worry,” he grins. He squeezes her hand and feels a subtle shift as a number of damage-mitigation systems activate within him.

The tension in her face fades away and she rests her head on his chest, the towel sandwiched between them. His neural net is awash with sleepy vindication and the susurrus of unheeded error codes.

“You’re...” but he finds he can not finish the thought. In his arms she is so very warm.

“You’re so warm,” she hums.

Ah. So it’s _him_. The water-stained ceiling undulates and forms protean patterns. He is so warm. She is so warm. They are warm together.

She is saying something. “…here tonight. If you want. I— I don’t want to think about work tomorrow, I don’t want to think about anything real. And it would be easier if I had you to think about instead.”

This makes sense to him. He _isn’t_ anything real. The words leave his mouth low and slow and sweet: “I’ll stay.”

She kisses his neck again and again.

Again and again...

And his body is permeated with a sense of wrongness so deep that it borders on pain.

“Ahhh _zymandias, King of Kings,_ _”_ he croaks, gaze darting wildly, as if the sea of amoeba-shaped stains holds the answer to his question. _“_ _Look_ _on_ _my_ _w_ uh… what… f-fucking…?”

She props herself on one elbow. “Huh? Are you okay?”

He sits up too quickly and she falls off him.

“Woah, hey!”

He stares dazedly across the room, acutely aware of the contrast between the action he is consciously directing his body to take, and what his self-preservative programming has wrested control of. He is out of sync, lagging behind himself like a shadow. If he could just contextualize the sensation spreading down his legs, spreading up his sternum— he pinches a bundle of wiring in his neck— sometimes that helps. This time it does not.

He stares across the room. She stares at him. There is quiet. Deep inside his body, there is a pop.

“No. No, no, no.” He hears his own voice, plaintive and weak. He feels the heat building in his brain casing now. “No, no, it’s— it’s new, it can’t— it’s new...”

“H-hey,” her voice is tremulous. “What’s wrong?”

She reaches for him as he stumbles off the bed. He paws at his stomach as his feet carry him unbidden to the kitchenette; a drawer is opened, a hand rummages through its contents.

She is shouting now. “Hey! What the hell is going on? What are you—” her voice breaks. “Are you sick? Talk to me!”

He looks at her and his head turns so slowly. “I...”

The hand has located— a spoon. Not ideal. The hand plunges it into his stomach nonetheless.

The sound of his abdomen rending open mingles with her scream.

His mother screamed, too, when broke her hand. He had not meant to. He was afraid. They were going to prepare dinner together, and she was showing him how to use the stove. He remembers with perfect clarity, because he can not remember any other way, the click of the burner being switched on but not igniting. He remembers the hiss of gas. _Oh_ _yes_ _,_ his mother said. W _hen this happens, you_ _simply_ _switch it again, like this._ And she turned the knob again and there was a little gasp of flame. The heat did not even lick his skin, was nowhere near close enough. He gripped her hand, and he heard the tiny sound of her metacarpal bones compacting. And she screamed.

He had never seen his father so angry. His mother pleaded with him and scolded him. _He’s only a child!_ His father stomped around the house and finally stomped all the way out the door.

He also remembers the second time he broke her hand. It was an accident then, too. But after she was done screaming, she didn’t plead or scold. She looked at him with wide, wet eyes, and was silent.

He wonders if this is why she let him be disassembled and forgotten. Not because he was too strong, but because he was and is so terribly fragile, and like many breakable things, made himself monstrous in response.

The spoon clatters to the ground. Mealy, rust-orange sludge is oozing from a stretch of ruptured artery. It is not the new pump that is the source of the problem; in fact, it is operating perfectly. It is operating so well it has dislodged a neglected pocket of vileness he had not known was there. Where had it been hiding? In the tubing in his legs? Arms? Chest?

The hand rams itself up under the subprocessor units nestled in his rib cage. Fingers brush against the network of wiring there, prodding connection points so hot the contact makes him flinch. The hand comes away wet and gritty. His father pours his tea out on the ground. Disgusting.

She is crying against the wall now; he takes a step in her direction and she wails atonally and clings to herself.

She had wanted him to stay.

“What _ered claered?”_ She gasps for breath.

His language processing systems are flickering on and offline. It takes all of his concentration to form the words. “I don’t know… what you’re saying!”

She presses her cheek against the wall and bawls. _“What are you?”_

This he understands. He lunges toward her, and with a sound more like a sob than a shout, he rips a shelf from the wall, scattering a multitude of precious things across the floor. His father steps over the mess, walks back down the hill. The little mammal on the sill streaks across the room and cowers atop the broken replicator. Lore laughs because there is no fluid left in his body thin enough to cry.

Life is nothing but a series of disappointments, big and small.

“ _Trlaeic eid!”_ Her sea glass eyes are rimmed red. _“Eid e_ _y_ _ad trlaead!”_

“ _Fuck you,”_ he slurs, and slams open the front door.

He lurches into the street. It is empty. If there are lavender faces pressed against windowpanes watching his naked, hemorrhaging body stagger in the direction of the waterfront, he does not see them. The night is very cold, and tendrils of steam— or perhaps it is smoke— rise off of his hunched shoulders, entwine around his head, like a crown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well... i hope you're feeling refreshed, fulfilled, moisturized, etc... this was the first hetero sex I've written since i can remember. isn't that fun?
> 
> Lore deserves a hug and probably significant prison time. and we love him for it
> 
> find me on tumblr @ strangesaturday
> 
> come hang with us in the [daforge discord server!](https://discord.gg/qMAGw5BqXg) it's a very low-key friendly atmosphere, so join us! (18+ only, please)


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